Effective Anxiety and Depression Management Techniques: A Personal Journey
Reviews the practices that work best to support a resilient mind that remains in a state of low agitation even as the turbulent flow of life surrounds me.
Last Updated: 07 May 2024
Background
I've had anxiety and depression for over 50 years. For around 30 of those years it was debilitating. I found this frustrating and puzzling and at time I experienced strong feelings of anger and despair.
In my 20s and 30s I followed medical advice that centered around exercise and medication and I also followed the advice of my spiritual teachers and friends. I found beta blockers helped with my heart palpitations, but did not find Atavan (a benzodiazepine) to have much effect at all. Likewise I did not receive much help from traditional healing practices such as petitionary prayer, anointing with oil, laying on of hands, the rosary, breathwork, or therapeutic touch. I tried them all.
Beginning in 2007 I started on a new path. When my father died that year, I went to see a psychiatrist for the first time. He was an older man who was seeing me on his last day before retiring and he seemed particularly thoughtful and present. He gave me advice that turned out to be the most helpful I received. He told me that for my particular presentation, he would recommend something he didn't recommend often, depth psychology. I had studied Freud, Jung and Adler and while interesting, I didn't think there was much scientific evidence that their therapies worked any better than talking over the fence to a neighbor. So I did not take his advice. Instead I avoided my anxiety by immersing myself in a large project. I launched my 100 lakes project, and began to follow my intuition about what was healing and what was not. While the project was important for my grieving process, and gave me a creative outlet, I eventually return to my search for a solution. My new psychiatrist recommended schema therapy, which in 2013 proved to be very helpful.
The success of schema therapy was, unfortunately, limited, because it did not address the basic core of my anxiety, which for me is a fear of the loss of meaning and purpose. That was what the 100 lakes project had provided.
My goal since 2014 has been to integrate the practices that work best to support a resilient mind; one that remains in a state of low agitation even as the turbulent flow of life surrounds me. This stronghold home-base, this calm aliveness, is a place to return to and rest in as needed. The idea is to practice the state I most want to be in most of the time, so that I can engage in the difficult and challenging things of life, which also tend to be the most meaningful.
Below is my ongoing list. I've tried to arrange these from most effective to least effective.